Issue 3: Forgive, Forget, or Fuck Off

and peaks its head around the hearth replacing a silver branch with a warm ember in the valley finally comes to rest the swirling water an adulterated flame of youth and fatigue hued into soft cherry and balsam rising from drink of a forgotten whiskey the autumn of...

Forgive and forget. We hear these words used together so often that by the time we’re old enough to really think about what they mean, they’ve already been hardwired into our brains. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who is also a professional writer, it’s been...

What do you see when you look at me? This broken, fragile vessel Of a used up fragrance That radiated Confidence from my pores Yet somehow The scent no longer Lingers on my wilted frame You see, I am a woman. I am a woman whose Stomach has a pit as Deep as the earth’s...

text reads: Often, I imagined myself to be Laura Ingalls, of Little House on the Prairie, adored by her father, Charles. He wouldn’t beat his daughter for looking out at the world, out at no one and nowhere. On those days, I would sit on his beloved brown leather...

2015 - Happy New Year, the year I decided would be the year I told any man I felt deserved it “To go fuck themselves,” this was my empowerment. My voice was and has been changed forever, forgive, and forget, no one ever forgets the memory of an abuser; the abuse from...

Yes, my god, please, please fuck off. I can’t think of a better way to put it. Just fucking fuck off. Leave me alone, don’t ever talk to my family again, and please keep me out of your thoughts. That really is all I want. I think… It’s been almost three years now...

“My grief lies all within; and these external manners of lament are merely shadows to the unseen grief that swells with silence in the tortured soul.” - William Shakespeare Acceptance November 2006 Acrylic on Canvas 16 x 20 This quote from Shakespeare about grief is...

When I was nine, I sat, afraid, in a confession booth in the church I had been unwillingly dragged to nearly every Sunday of my life. The same church where I had been forced to sit and listen to the prayers and preaching of people I thought were full of shit. I always...

unannounced outpouring of specific trauma with heaves and choked sobs and garbled words in a room of seated captivated people looking for social reform and breaths as anger and solitude and trauma permeate like a smoking gun igniting the next pistol and the next and...